Search form

You are here

Romantic Circles Blog

The new album by independent pop musician, John Vanderslice (formerly of MK Ultra), Cellar Door, contains perhaps the most recent in a long line of adaptations of P. B. Shelley's political song on the occasion of the Peterloo massacre, The Mask of Anarchy. The lyrics of "Pale Horse" are taken straight from Shelley's ballad (with a little cutting and pasting and one or two interpolations). Listeners can even download an MP3 audio file here.

from the haunts of daily life
where is waged the daily strife
common wants and common cares
cuts the human heart with tears

rise like lions after a slumber
in greatly unknowable numbers

let the tyrants pour around
with apocalyptic sound
on the charge of iron wheels
and the crash of horse’s heels

rise like lions after a slumber
in greatly unknowable numbers
free the blood that must ensue
we are many and they are few

from the workhouse and the prison
pale as corpses newly risen
knives are drawn now let them see
standing tall that say they’re free

your strong and simple words
set to wound as sharpened swords
wide as targets let them be
with their shade to cover me

rise like lions after a slumber
in greatly unknowable numbers
free the blood that must ensue
we are many and they are few
SJ

Parent Resource:

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of the electronic edition of America a Prophecy copy M. One of 14 extant copies, and one of only four that are colored, copy M was printed c. 1807. Now in the Yale Center for British Art, it joins copies A, E, and O in the Archive and will be joined by copies F and H in the near future.

America is dated 1793 on its title plate, and the first ten copies were printed that year followed in 1795 by two more copies. Copies E (1793) and A (1795) are from these two printing sessions. Copy O was the last to be printed, c. 1818. With the addition of copy M, the printing history of America is fully represented in the Archive.

Copy M, however, is an oddity, for it was uniquely printed with no other works during a period when Blake appears to have been generally inactive in the printing of his illuminated books. It is the only illuminated book printed on Hayes & Wise 1799 paper and with most of its plates printed in blue ink. It appears to have been printed while Blake was proofing various plates from the first two chapters of Jerusalem, some of which are also in blue ink. A few of these proofs will enter the Archive in the near future.

Parent Resource:

For those of you following the story of the possible sale of the John Murray Archive, a recent article on Scotsman.com cites Joan Winterkorn, director and chief of valuations, antiquarian booksellers Bernard Quaritch, who was recently asked to value the Murray Archive--and "put the value at £45m, possibly more." The National Library of Scotland hopes to buy the collection for £33 million.

"What I had not anticipated was the extraordinary richness and depth of the collection, the many hundreds of boxes of letters that have never been catalogued and have seldom been consulted," Winterkorn says.

Parent Resource:

We asked Michael O'Neill, of the University of Durham, "What are you working on?"

I have been working on a number of things, all connected with my wish to write on poems that I admire and to explore why I think they are impressive. Most of these projects have appeared in essay form: forthcoming pieces include an essay on "Adonais" and poetic power, a wide-ranging survey of poetic forms and Romanticism for Nicholas Roe's new OUP volume on Romanticism, further work on Beddoes, an essay on the legacy of Romanticism in the work of twentieth-century poets, especially Crane, Stevens, Yeats, and Bishop, an essay on Shelley's translation of the Symposium that seeks to explore its qualities as a "prose poem," some essays on Byron (including a piece on Beppo), and an essay on "Madness in poetry from Shelley to Plath." What I'm trying to work towards is a book on Romanticism and its Poetic Legacy.

Best wishes,
Michael O'Neill

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

Next month, Romantic Circles will launch a special section called Romantic Pedagogies, which will continue to expand well into the summer. Within this section, we plan to set up a "Romantic Commons" in which teaching issues can be discussed and teachers' materials shared with one another.

We plan to establish the section on a firm scholarly footing, including peer-review and MOO conference participation as part of each thematic-based "issue" or site produced. All Romantic Circles materials are peer-reviewed, of course, but we add this by way of indicating that we would work to ensure that people's work "published" and discussed in this site will be adequately valued by their home institutions.

Leaders would serve as editors of thematically named issues within the Pedagogy Commons. For example, we could imagine a special issue called "Wordsworth's Pedagogy," or, say, one on Romantic Ecology. We had originally planned to launch the Commons with the theme "Romantic Women Writers," asking in particular our continental associates how they teach British Romantic women writers. Those interested in helping to establish Romantic Pedagogy Commons as part of the RC Pedagogies section should contact us.

Laura Mandell
Ron Broglio
Tilar Mazzeo

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

The John Murray Archive--a collection built by the famous publishing house that includes, among other important papers, Byron's correspondence--may soon move from London to the National Library of Scotland (at a cost of something close to £33 million). As readers of this blog will know, Byron’s literary executor inherited the poet's papers and his daughter bequeathed them to the Murrays. (See the story this week in Scotsman.com.) The British Library has expressed support for the move. The Scottish Library has plans to stage for special exhibitions devoted to the works of Lord Byron, Jane Austen, and others. (See as well this article at the BBC 4 site.)

SJ

Parent Resource:

Romantic Circles is pleased to announce the publication of a new volume in its Praxis series, Romantic Libraries, edited by Ina Ferris. It can be found in the Praxis section of Romantic Circles or directly at:

According to Ferris, the essays in Romantic Libraries "respond to a historical bibliophilia that played into forms of early Romantic masculinity to produce a personal and private inflection of library culture. The volume concentrates on men and their books, exploring the intersection of bookishness, male subjectivity, and literary value. Essays by Heather Jackson, Deidre Lynch, and Ina Ferris set out to make more visible than has hitherto been the case in Romantic studies the ways in which the physical book--as affective and interiorized object--became central to both personal and cultural identity-formation during the period."

Main Blog Categories:

Parent Resource:

Biographer Richard Holmes recently published an article in The Guardian about the death of Shelley--or, rather, the legend of the death. Holmes says for example that

Biography is caught and frozen, so to speak, in the glamorous headlights of Shelley's death. But if we set that death aside, if we switch off its hypnotic dazzle for a moment, maybe quite different patterns and trajectories can emerge from Shelley's life.

On January 29, Holmes delivered the innaugural lecture in the National Portrait Gallery's "Interrupted Lives" lecture series. An accompanying book will be published in the autumn. Inevitably, Holmes spends some time thinking about the boats involved, especially the doomed Don Juan. For another reading of the sailing skills of all those on the boat that day, see "On the Instability of Vessels and Narratives: A Nautical Perspective on the Sinking of the Don Juan" by Joseph Dane, Keats-Shelley Journal 47 (1998), 63-86.

Parent Resource:

A local news source yesterday remarked on the removal of a tall construction crane in Grasmere, all part of the building of the Wordsworth Trust's new Jerwood Centre. The library will be closed to scholars for about six months while the project is completed.

Another story reports that Wordsworth's childhood house in Cockermouth, Cumbria, refurbished by the National Trust, will be reopened to the public in June of this year.

Parent Resource:

The William Blake Archive is pleased to announce the publication of "Illuminated Printing." It joins our profusely illustrated Biography, Chronology, and Glossary in the "About Blake" section, off the Table of Contents page. The essay was first published in The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, edited by Morris Eaves, 2003. It is republished here by permission of Cambridge University Press. While the text remains the same, the electronic version has 95 illustrations versus 9 in the printed version. The illustrations demonstrate in detail the stages of both Blake's relief etching ("illuminated printing") and conventional intaglio etching according to the six Chambers in the Printing house in Hell, from Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The comparison of these two methods of etching will help reveal what was borrowed, altered, invented, and radical in Blake's new mode of graphic production. The illustrations, which are linked to enlargements that have detailed captions, supplement the text but also function autonomously as slide shows on the technical and aesthetic contexts in which illuminated printing was invented, and as tutorials in the production of engravings, etchings, and relief etchings.